


How Tavish Completely Ruined His Life: A Biography

by No_Good_Reason



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 06:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1334737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/No_Good_Reason/pseuds/No_Good_Reason
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short piece I wrote for a friend. Details Tavish DeGroot's origins, how he was recruited by RED, and the beginnings of his friendship with the BLU Soldier.</p><p>NOTE: While I kept some elements of canon, some I completely discarded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Tavish Completely Ruined His Life: A Biography

The dark, one-eyed man rushed through the halls of the base known as Coldfront. He pumped a few grenades around the corner, then rushed behind them. Seeing no-one there, he took the opportunity to set up a stickybomb trap. He affixed four of the small, circular bombs to the wall, and another two to the ceiling. He then slunk back behind the corner to wait for a victim. 

He didn’t have to wait long. It was merely seconds later that a … that someone in a gas mask and a blue jumpsuit sprinted around the corridor, muttering something to itself. Tavish sent the mute freak to its grave in a heartbeat. Chunks of what was a Pyro splattered on the walls, and the mercenary’s flamethrower clunked against the floor, pilot light still burning. Tavish cackled out loud. “Couldn’t ye see the bloody bombs?” he taunted. 

It was hard to believe that a short five years were all that separated this drunk lunatic from a young boy with stars in his eyes.  
\----------  
It had been an ordinary day in the DeGroot household. Tavish’s mother was working in her garden overlooking the Lochett Ness, his father was helping her plant the flowers, and Tavish was playing his Explosions Game.  
It was a simple game. He would arrange his green plastic army men in the dirt over the land mine. There was no land mine, of course, but he did have a large stick stuck in the ground. When he felt the army men were sufficiently unaware of their impending doom, Tavish would thrust the stick upwards through the dirt and mutter “Kaboom” to himself. 

Dirt and army men went flying. He would fill the inevitable hole it made, rearrange the army men, and start anew. He could do this for hours at a time.  
This evening, Tavish’s father had been watching him with an odd sort of fascination. He’d had a sneaking suspicion about the boy, but it was then that he was sure that Tavish could continue the family tradition. He carefully walked over to the boy, avoiding any obstacles – his depth perception was subpar – and sat down behind the boy, who didn’t see his father.

“Ey, Tavish.” His son sat bolt upright and turned around. “I ever tell ye ‘bout wot yer father used tae do for a livin’?”

Tavish thought about this. He blinked once, looked down at the army men, then looked up. “No, Pa. I dinnae think ye did.”  
The senior DeGroot chuckled and picked up one of the army men. He held it close to his one remaining eye and wiped a speck of dirt off of the toy soldier’s bazooka. “Is how I lost me eye.” He set the army man in the dirt and tapped at his eyepatch. “Ye want to know how yer fa earned ‘is keep, lad?”

Tavish was rapturous. He had always wondered what his father had done for a living, but the older DeGroot had always been hesitant. All he had told him was that he had lost his eye a long, long time ago, “like ye grandfather, and his father afore him.” Finally he spoke. “Aye, Pa. I’d like that a lot.” He dropped the army men, forgotten, by his feet.

Mr. DeGroot swallowed, and began to explain, in rudimentary terms, what he had done for a living. “I was a, uh, a Demoman. I ever tell ye what a Demoman was, lad?” After seeing Tavish shake his head, he went on. “Yer whole family’s been Demomen, laddie. Alla’ way back to Sir George the Eclectic.

“Now, er. Ye may be wondrin’ wot exactly a Demoman does.” Tavish was staring at his father, eyes wide and adoring. “Well, as a Demoman, ‘twas me job to use explosives ‘n keep me team safe. I --” and here he stopped, because Tavish’s eyes had gone still wider, and his jaw had dropped comically low, so that Tavish’s father could see his uvula, shivering in the back of his throat. He looked like a boy who’d seen a ghost – or his hero. 

“You…did…but…Pa…my…” the boy murmured The older DeGroot coughed awkwardly and looked down. He tipped one of the green army men over into the dirt with the end of his cane. “Er…ye okay, lad?” he asked after a while. Tavish nodded once, twice, three times. He leaned forward and said with a surprising intensity, “I want tae know about everything ye did, Fa. Everything.”

Silently, the older man nodded.

And so Tavish’s father would regale him with tales of escapades and explosions, of destruction and dynamite. For months he would talk of defending choke points and tell stories of courage and heroism. And after every story, he would give Tavish a sip of whisky. “Jes’ a sip, lad,” he said, handing his son the flask and leaning on his cane. “I dinnae want you to get sick.” 

The drink was like fire in Tavish’s throat. It tasted like immortality. It tasted like life and death and it caught in his throat. He loved it.  
He would also be treated to a small firecracker that his pa would pull from some unseen pocket. It was always a small thing, about the same size and shape as a roll of quarters, but it could pack quite a punch. When he buried it under his army men’s headquarters and set the thing off, it burned one of the plastic troops in half. He watched it sizzle as the melted green plastic bubbled on the dirt, and that was when he had the best, worst idea of his life.

He was going to kill the Loch Ness Monster. He would gather up all the explosives he could, throw them all in the lake, and then send Nessie belly up. It would be easy to accomplish – he was certain that his father still had some bombs lying around. He could see it now, the geyser of water spewing out of the previously tranquil surface, the body of the sea serpent floating to the top, the way the people cheered and said “Yer a right bright lad, Tav.” He would be remembered forever as the legendary hero who slew Nessie. He’d be famous. His father would be so proud.

And all he needed to do was find the bombs.

His search seemed daunting. The DeGroot household was sprawling. His family had been living there for centuries, building offshoots and separate wings and adding basements and removing floors and God only knew what else. The house was huge. To the young Tavish, it seemed that it would take several lifetimes to fully explore. He assumed that one would want to store bombs in the lower levels of the house, because there the heat and damp and cold wouldn’t affect them as much. So he picked a location at random and set off.

His attention span, however, cut short after about an hour of searching. He felt like he had been looking through dusty crates and chests for an entire lifetime, and was dismayed to find that he had only searched one room of the uppermost sub-basement. His mother was calling him – she had some manual task for him to complete – and he set off, following the sound of her voice up the many sets of stairs.

He searched the house off and on for three years, until he was fourteen and finally realized that perhaps the explosives were stored upstairs. He came to this realization while sprawled out in the field behind Manor DeGroot, dead drunk. He’d found an antique cask of gin on one of the sub-basements, and he had been siphoning it off into a flask. The gin was hard, and it bit like a mean dog. By this point, Tavish had already built up a hard tolerance for alcohol, but a few swigs of this brew could have him floundering like a rookie sailor. 

He stumbled up the stairs to the manor’s uppermost floor, which was decorated in a baroque style. Antique clocks decorated the walls, and many precious heirlooms had been relegated to dusty cabinets up here. Tavish looked around with vision that was becoming increasingly blurry, and he saw nothing of interest. Cursing softly to himself, he turned to walk back down the stairs and hit his head on the trapdoor that was hanging down behind him.

He had walked right past it. There was a collapsed ladder in the attic, and to reach it he would have to grab it and pull it down. This quickly proved too difficult for him in his inebriated state. He told himself that he would return once he was sober, and he fell back down the stairs. 

As it turned out, it took him two days for him to come down off of his buzz. And when it did, he had the worst headache any man had ever known. His tongue felt like it had been used to sand down a poorly-made birdhouse, his head felt like it had been beaten with rocks and set out in the sun to dry, his breath smelled like an animal had not only died in his mouth, but also been scientifically preserved there, and his eyes felt like they were frying in their sockets at even the merest mention of light. As his father would say, he’d need to be glued back together in @#!*% . He cried softly to himself as he curled into a fetal position.

A harsh knock on the door sent splinters driving into his ears. He moaned and drove his face deeper into the pillow.

“Tavish, is yer mum! Get up, ye lazy barstid!”

A single, desperate sob leaked from Tavish’s throat. He felt tears stream from his eyes. His head was pounding.

“Don’t make me break down this door. Donnae think I will not do it!” 

His mother screamed at him from the other side of the thick, Norman construction. He finally asked himself what his father would do. However, he realized that blowing up his mother was not a viable option. Thusly, he reluctantly got out of bed, winced at the rays of light streaming through the curtained windows, and opened the door. There stood his mother, glaring up at him.

“D’ye know what time it is?” she asked. Before he had a chance to slur an answer, she continued.

“S’nearly ten o’clock. D’ye think yer father would laze aboot until ten o’clock like a bloody lummox? I donnae think so!” This angry barrage of words felt to Tavish like a hot skewer right into the sorest part of his mind. He groaned, and stomped past his mother. She kept screaming at him as he walked along and concentrated on not throwing up. 

That day’s chores were arduous. It was going to take a long time for him to sweat the hangover out of his system. In the meantime, even the tiniest of sensory input was like a branding iron on his brain. Until, that is, he remembered the unexplored attic.

The hangover was forgotten instantly. He barreled through the hallways and up the flights of stairs like he’d been shot out of a cannon. He actually ran past the trapdoor before he realized it was there. He doubled back and quickly gained access to the secret room. 

It was dark, and he fumbled for a match. Once he’d lit it, he quickly realized what a fool he was.

The room was full of explosives. Dynamite, claymores, what looked to Tavish like land mines, and some old potato-masher grenades. (These last bore the logo of a company Tavish didn’t recognize. “Mann Co,” he muttered to himself, holding the match closely to the surface of the grenade. He did not realize how foolish an idea this was.) 

After taking stock of everything within, he estimated that there were in excess of two thousand pounds of high explosives in the room. He smiled to himself – this was far more than enough to put a hurt on old Nessie. All he had to do was wait for the perfect opportunity.

As it turned out, the perfect opportunity was merely a few days later. His parents were out of the house (Off sailing somewhere. Tavish didn’t know where, and he didn’t much care, either) and he had almost the entire morning to puzzle out a way to deliver the payload.

To the partly inebriated boy, the best way seemed simple. He would tie about twenty sticks of dynamite together, dump them into a rowboat he’d made when he was wee, affix an extra-long fuse, light said fuse, and then shove the boat into the water. He had gotten as far as step 2 when he decided that the dynamite looked rather lonely in the bottom of the boat. He added thirty or so of the land mines, and then a few dozen more of the grenades for good measure. All told, the boat weighed almost three hundred pounds when he was through. He strained as he pulled the boat towards the shore of the Loch.

Finally, he managed to get the rowboat into the water. The small sail (painted with a coat of arms Tavish had designed himself) fluttered weakly in the breeze. Tavish lit a match, affixed it to the fuse (which he had made himself out of an old sheet) and gave the boat a mighty kick.

The tiny, overloaded boat bobbed in the water of the Loch before getting caught by the wind. The boat began to pick up speed, drifting towards the center of the Loch. There was another sailboat on the Loch. Tavish worried over this for a moment before discarding it, reasoning that the vessel was probably empty. It was a rubbish day for sailing anyhow. 

Tavish was feeling an odd sensation that could only be described as eager. His heart was pounding, his stomach was fluttering, he could feel his face flushing, and he noted with an odd fascination that he had an erection. He ignored it, focusing on the boat. Any second now … He was seconds away from being the most famous boy in all of Scotland. They’d remember him forever.

The boat exploded.

It was nothing like what Tavish expected, and yet it was exactly what he wanted. One second he was watching the small speck on the horizon, and the next there was a great white column of fire on the surface of the Loch and a sound like God in all his wrath. It was a great, blooming flower of fire and ash that kissed the sky and sent ripples of water in all directions. Tavish whooped with joy, and took a long drink from his flask. The wreckage of the boat flew near and far; one chunk of board narrowly missed his head. 

Some of the explosives, which had hitherto been unaffected, exploded now. Tavish didn’t hear it or see it: he had been partially deafened by the first report and was now dancing a drunken jig on the shore. He was cackling to himself. The bomb was the most perfect thing he had ever done. He felt a twinge of regret that he’d never be able to create something so great again. (The fact that something so destructive was his greatest act of creation niggled at his mind. He frowned, and smothered that thought with more drink.)

Some people had left their homes, drawn by the noise and the spectacle. They were shielding their eyes from the glare and shouting something Tavish couldn’t hear. He stared into the Loch and waited for Nessie’s body to float to the surface. There was no way the beastie could survive something like that!

But the monster never did wash onto shore. However, he did find several unexploded potato-masher grenades, wreckage from the rowboat, several hundred dead minnows, and the handle of an ivory cane.

After two hours or so of waiting, Tavish decided that his adventure had been a failure. He trudged home, dejected, until he realized that his father would surely be impressed with his exploits. He rushed home, happier than ever.

But his parents never came home.

Tavish didn’t figure it out immediately. He didn’t suddenly realize what he’d done in a blinding flash of reason. The pieces all came together, but it took half an hour for him to realize what it all meant. The sailing trip. The continued absence of his parents. The second boat out on the water. The cane.

Suddenly, Tavish felt an urge to vomit, an urge he succumbed to in a large mixing bowl. He began to cry the deep, undignified sobs of a drunk. His wails sounded as though he was being murdered. The thing was – he was the murderer. This thought made him cry all the harder. Tears and snot made tracks in the ash covering his face. 

He knelt onto the floor and grasped his head in his hands. He was wretched.

He lay there, on the kitchen floor, for what felt like a million years. When he felt as though he had cried for all his life, he finally stood and began to teeter around the house, like a newborn deer.

His eyes fell on a picture his father had taken when Tavish was a few days old. Tavish’s mother was holding him and smiling so wide that Tavish could see her gums. It was the only real smile he’d ever seen her with. He began to sniffle again, and soon the sniffles turned into sobs, and the sobs turned into the horrible, horrible wails, and he was lying on the couch wondering if he had enough explosives left to kill himself.

He lay there on the sofa for a number of days. He stared at the ceiling, wondering if he really could omit himself with the remaining bombs, or if all he would be able to do was tear a hole so wide in his body he could just collapse in on himself. He debated the pros and cons of each option.  
Of course, he could just wait for the police to come. In the small village the DeGroots lived in, the police force consisted of three overweight men in a room bickering at each other and drawing straws to decide who had to go help Missus Leigh get her cat down from the tree. Tavish had no doubt that it would be at least a month before his parents were reported missing, and another month after that before one of the officers decided to shift their saggy arse down to the manor. 

He would hesitate to call his activities through the next few weeks “living.” He would also hesitate to call it “existing.” He shuffled about in a state resembling the zombies he read about in funnybooks. He got up, made a cup of tea, and then left the tea to cool on the counter while he sat in the other room. If he felt particularly adventurous, he would make a plate of eggs and then let them harden, untouched, on the table in front of him. He’d sit there, at the table, until sunset. At that point he would get up and go lie in bed all night.

He was midway through his twenty-third day of this routine when he heard a knock at the door. He stood up with a start. Was this the police, finally come to arrest him or kill him? Was it Missus Leigh, needing some help with her cat? Maybe it was God himself, come to smite Tavish off the face of the earth. Tavish quite liked the sound of that last one, actually.  
He sat there for another twenty seconds before the knock came again, more urgently. He realized where he was and stood up. He walked past the twenty-three mugs of tea, past the row of pictures (all of them turned down so Tavish couldn’t see them), and past his father’s array of keepsakes from his job at the company.

He looked though the peephole. To his surprise, the woman standing there was one he didn’t recognize at all. She was fairly short, kept her dark hair tied in a bun behind her thick-framed glasses, and wore a blouse and a cardigan. Overall, she gave the impression that she was here for business, and business alone. She intimidated Tavish, on some base level. He took a deep breath and opened the door, just as she raised her hand to knock once more.

She stopped herself, and smiled primly. “Good morning – or,” she checked a watch on her right wrist, “should I say, good afternoon. Is this the DeGroot residence?” 

Tavish ran his tongue along his suddenly dry lips. Was this woman from the authorities? Her American accent was certainly unusual enough. “Aye. I mean, yes. ‘Tis.”

The woman nodded, as though she knew this but needed confirmation. “And are you Tavish DeGroot?”

He nodded back, slowly.

The prim smile returned to her face. “Well, then. I hear that you had a bit of an accident. And I have to say, I have the most fantastic opportunity for you.”  
\----------  
And so here he was, on a train to somewhere called – he consulted the map – Teufort. It was some hick town in the middle of bloody nowhere, dead smack in the middle of the States. He had some idea of what he was employed to do, although he was still a little fuzzy on the details. The woman – she insisted on Tavish referring to her as “Miss Pauling” – didn’t explain much.

“You’ll be working for RED, just like your father,” she said, after she had invited herself inside. She had taken the warmest of the twenty-three teacups, and sat down at the filthy kitchen table. She didn’t say anything, just pushed the mess of moldy eggs to one side and set a briefcase down on an empty spot. “You’d be filling much of the same role, as well. I presume he told you the basics of what he did as a Demoman?”

Tavish nodded dully. He thought maybe this was a hallucination brought on by hunger.  
A tight frown formed on her face. “Well, that was a breach of contract. Speaking of, you’ll need to sign this.” She pulled a manuscript from her briefcase and pushed it into Tavish’s hands.

Tavish gathered enough wits to feebly protest against this odd, strong-willed woman. “Well, what if I donnae want this job?” he asked.

She laughed to herself. “Well then, Mr. DeGroot, I have a certain Officer MacGregor’s phone number. He’s very interested in the whereabouts of your parents. And if I can’t get your … mmm, cooperation on this matter, I’ll have no recourse but to call him.”

Most of what she’d said had flown right over Tavish’s head, but he understood the basics. Work with us or you’ll be sorry. Although he hadn’t touched a drink in weeks, he started to feel the beginnings of a hangover. He massaged his temples and moaned.

“I suppose I donnae have a choice, then,” he muttered.

She smiled again, and this time it seemed like she was enjoying his misfortune. 

“No, Mr. DeGroot. You really don’t.”  
\----------  
The company – called RED, which stood for something to do with demolition and excavation, Tavish wasn’t too sure – had sent him to Teufort for basic training. There he was assigned a room, acquired a set of weapons, and met several other men who apparently were his future team-mates. There was the obnoxious Scout, who ran faster than ten men and talked enough for twenty. There was the Australian Sniper, who seemed nice enough but kept to himself mostly. (Curiously, he had neither large muscles nor a mustache. Tavish thought maybe he was developmentally challenged.) There was the German, Medic, who acted aloof and more likely to spend time with the Heavy, a huge, Russian bear of a man. And then there was the mysterious Pyro, who never took of their mask and spoke in a strange, mumbling dialect. There were others, too, but Tavish didn’t remember their names.

At basic training, he was assigned two weapons: a grenade launcher and an odd contraption that was labeled “MANN CO STANDARD-ISSUE STICKYBOMB LAUNCHER. WARNING: DO NOT POINT AT FACE.” Tavish examined the ammunition for the gun and noted that they did indeed stick to the walls, floor, and ceiling of his room. He also learned that it was a poor idea to point the thing at his face. He wore an eyepatch after that incident.

He also found a case of hard liquor in his room, which he tore into with gusto. It was good stuff: not nearly as hard as the stuff he had back home, but there was a lot more of it. He spend nearly all of the time at boot camp half-drunk.

After two years at basic training, all the mercenaries were shipped out to various events related to their professions. He learned that the Scout was going to a track meet attended by Olympic runners. (The little git wouldn’t shut up about it.) Sniper was going to a three-day retreat in the Australian Outback. Nobody knew where Pyro was going.

Tavish was going to a projectile-weapons expo. “RocketCon 1962” was an eight-hour train ride away from Teufort. Tavish was looking forward to getting some sleep on the ride over. However, the man he was sitting next to had other plans.

He was seated next to a tall, stocky man holding a steel helmet in his hands. He turned the helmet over in his hands nervously. When Tavish walked to his assigned seat, the man looked up at him and smiled. “Hello there, private! Are you headed for RocketCon?” he asked.

Inwardly, Tavish groaned. So much for sleep.

The man spent the next hour talking about his past. Apparently, he’d tried to get into the military during World War 2, but he’d been declined because of flat feet. However, he didn’t let that stop him. He stole a plane to Poland and went on a Nazi-killing spree. However, he didn’t let up until 1949. 

“Er, hold on a minute, lad,” Tavish had interrupted here. “I thought the war ended in ’45.”  
“  
It did,” said the man, whose rough voice was honed from years of smoking unfiltered cigars. “Ah,” Tavish had said, saying nothing more. The man continued speaking.

The Polish government had demanded that the man – whose name was Jane, apparently – serve 249 consecutive life sentences for the murder of nearly two hundred innocent citizens. “But they didn’t fool me,” said Jane. “Those bastards were Nazis through and through, and they deserved everything they got.” He proudly donned his helmet. It was a size too large for his head, and to Tavish looked like it blocked his vision. When he pointed it out to Jane, the man laughed it off.

“I can see perfectly fine,” he said. “You shouldn’t be talking to anyone about being half-blind.” He pointed to Tavish’s eyepatch. Tavish reluctantly nodded and didn’t say anything. Jane filled the silence well enough, though.

t looked like Jane was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, when out of nowhere a representative of some company called him in prison. “It was some company I’d never heard of – some Builder’s Union or something,” he had said. The representative had said over the phone that the company was more than willing to make his legal problems disappear in exchange for a couple years of mercenary work.  
“  
Although I read that entire contract in jail, and you know what it said?” he asked. Tavish didn’t bother answering. He was staring out the window at the desert rolling by. “It said that our contract can be extended without our permission for up to twenty years.” He said this with a certain degree of glee.  
Tavish’s head whipped around so fast he could hear his neck bones pop. “Wot?” he asked, incredulously.

“I know! Isn’t it fantastic?” said Jane. Bloody hell, he really was excited about this. Tavish merely groaned and leaned back in his seat. Jane kept prattling on and on.  
“Twenty years of – of – hey mister, do you have any idea of what we’re actually doing at this place?” Tavish didn’t answer. He just focused on trying to sleep.

To his dismay, Jane followed him around RocketCon like a lost puppy. It was a shame, because if the man hadn’t been commenting on everything he saw, Tavish would have been having a good time. He met an interesting fellow who claimed that the future of explosives were in cannonballs.0

“Trust me,” said the man, “Within five years everyone who’s anyone will be using my prototype.” He gestured to the grenade launcher he had on his stand, which was labeled the Loose Cannon. Tavish took his business card and continued onward, while Jane stayed behind to bicker with the designer.

Tavish discovered a scholar who had written a thesis on how the invention of stairs hindered the development of rocket-jumping in the nineteenth century. He bought a copy of the paper and tucked it into his backpack for later. He also bought a couple hats from a stand outside the convention proper. The stand featured the likeness of a large, Australian man wearing cut-off jean shorts and nothing else. MANN CO HABERDASHERIES ARE THE BEST AROUND! proclaimed the mountainous man, who had chest hair in the shape of Australia. Now there’s a real Australian, thought Tavish. 

That evening, as Tavish boarded the train back to Teufort, he noted that Jane was nowhere to be found. He supposed the man was still arguing with the Loose Cannon’s designer and settled down to read the thesis he had bought.

He was surprised to find, however, that he couldn’t focus. He was even more surprised by the fact that he was worried about Jane. The man was fairly childlike, and Tavish felt somewhat responsible for him. He sighed, and set his things underneath his seat. 

He found Jane wandering about behind the haberdashery. The man seemed to be collecting spare change off of the ground. His back was to Tavish.

“Jest wot’re you doing back here?” he asked, noticing the authoritative tone in his voice. Jane quickly jumped in surprise and dropped what money he had collected. He spun around to face Tavish.

“N-nothing,” he said, and Tavish could see that he had a black eye, a split lip, and several bruises on his face. He looked away from Tavish.

“Ach! Wot’s happened to ye, lad?” Tavish took several steps toward Jane, but Jane backed away.

“I was…accosted by several ruffians,” he said, refusing to look at Tavish. “They defeated me in hand-to-hand combat, and – and they took my money. I am now trying to acquire enough change for the train ride home.”

Tavish sighed. Of course. “Come along lad,” he said, taking Jane by the arm. “I’ll pay for ye.”

Jane’s eyes brightened, and a smile filled his face. “Really? You’d do that?”

“Aye,” said Tavish, who couldn’t help but smile himself. “I’ll buy ye a hat from the haberdashery, too.” 

And the way Jane laughed at that was odd. It made Tavish feel happy, for the first time since his parents had died. They bought Jane a hat (which he promptly jammed onto his head) and walked back to the train.

They did not know that they would be forced to kill each other many, many times over before the year was through.


End file.
